Girl rescued from ice north of Belmont Harbor

Jose M. Osorio / Chicago Tribune

Area near where a girl fell onto the Lake Michigan ice north of Belmont Harbor on Sunday, Feb. 9, 2014. Note that the vertical marks are the marks made by the fire department ladder used by the fire department to get onto the ice, shoe marks on right of the vertical marks as well.

Area near where a girl fell onto the Lake Michigan ice north of Belmont Harbor on Sunday, Feb. 9, 2014. Note that the vertical marks are the marks made by the fire department ladder used by the fire department to get onto the ice, shoe marks on right of the vertical marks as well. (Jose M. Osorio / Chicago Tribune)

Stephanie K. Baer

What was only a matter of minutes “felt like an eternity,” said one witness who watched as divers safely pulled a 13-year-old girl off the ice of Lake Michigan on Sunday morning.

“Luckily she wasn’t in the water,” said Chicago resident Cherelyn Riesmeyer, who had been walking along the lakefront with her husband and two dogs when the girl wandered away from her mother onto the ice.

The girl, who has autism and doesn’t speak, was with her mother when she “started playing on the ice,” ending up about 100 feet away from the shoreline just north of Belmont Harbor, said Chicago Fire Chief Verdi Allen.

A squad of divers responded to the scene in about 10 minutes and crawled out onto the ice to recover her, according to Ron Dorneker, deputy district fire chief for the Chicago Fire Department.

The girl, who was barefoot, was laying on top of the ice when the divers reached her.

“They talked to her for a second (and were) able to carry her off the ice,” Dorneker said. “She was cold.”

Divers responded to two other reports of people on the ice midday Sunday, and they also were recovered safely, Dorneker said. No one needed medical attention.

“It’s dangerous out there,” Dorneker said. “So far we’ve managed to get everybody off the ice before they fell into the water.”

One group of three or four kids wandered onto the ice up by Touhy Avenue. A man, who was walking his dog, ended up on the lake near the 4700 block of South Lakeshore Drive.

Dorneker said it's common for people to stray onto the ice.

“It’s hard to tell where the shoreline ends and where the lake begins,” he said. “One day you could be standing on the ice and the next it could all be water.”

Joanne Earnhardt, 68, of Chicago was cross-country skiing along the lakefront Sunday morning when she saw emergency vehicles leave the scene with the 13-year-old girl.

Earnhardt said it was difficult to see what was land and what was not.

“It’s deceptive. You have no idea what’s underneath there,” she said. “It's a scary thing.”

The girl was taken by ambulance to St. Joseph's Hospital to be checked, but she appeared to be OK, said Allen, the Chicago fire chief.

Dorneker said he didn’t know what the girl was doing so close to the water or whether she had slipped off the edge. The concrete bank was covered in several inches of snow on top of a layer of ice.

“I know (for) a lot of people it can be tempting (to walk along the water),” he said. “It’s happened a lot this year.”